After an advocate closely involved in the Green Line extension suggested the state might hand down a recommendation as early Monday on where the rail should end, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation (EOT) on Wednesday cancelled a planned meeting and said that it was not prepared to share more details of its research with the public.
A Green Line Extension Project Advisory Group public meeting, scheduled over a month ago for Sept. 15, was called off because project leaders do "not yet have available all of the information of importance [concerning the] results of the analysis regarding the terminus of the line," the EOT's project team said in an e-mail to community members.
But delaying the announcement "does not adversely affect the overall project schedule," the EOT wrote.
"We want to make sure that we have all of our data completely together, and we aren't just quite at that point yet," Kate Fichter, the deputy director of the project at the EOT, told the Daily. She added that the EOT is currently focusing on not only potential terminal stops, but also the potential location of a support facility in Somerville for the extended line, as well as details related to the Union Square stop on the extension.
Two Medford locations are being considered as potential endpoints, one at the intersection of College Avenue and Boston Avenue and another at the intersection of the Mystic Valley Parkway (Route 16) and Boston Avenue. The former would be located along the commuter rail tracks by Curtis Hall, the building that houses Brown and Brew.
The Daily reported on Monday that Ken Krause, a member of the advocacy group the Medford Green Line Neighborhood Alliance, said the final word could come at the planned Sept. 15 meeting. He told the Daily that a number of factors — from environmental to socioeconomic — would factor into the EOT's decision of where to end the line. Krause's group supports a Route 16 terminal.
The Green Line extension, which was promised more than 15 years ago, received a boost in April when Gov. Deval Patrick allocated $600 million to fund the project and guarantee completion by its 2014 deadline.
In addition to the cancellation of the meeting, in its e-mail the EOT also announced the postponement of a series of public meetings that were originally scheduled for late September and early October.
"We're working as quickly and diligently as we can and obviously want to get the stuff out to the public as quickly as we can," Fichter said.
